Clear Sense

Clear Sense Introduction

Clear Sense is a Swedish web services company offering search engine optimization, AdWords support, and online marketing services. It's based in Halmstad on the west coast of Sweden, and its parent company FCR Media was founded in 1943. Clear Sense appears to have been selling hosting since 2013 alongside other services, such as web design and consultancy.

FCR Media currently employs 1,300 employees, and its hosting division offers shared hosting services and domain name registrations. The company markets all of its plans in Swedish only, but you can use Google Translate to get a feel for what it offers.

Services and Specializations

As mentioned in the introduction, Clear Sense's hosting division is part of a much larger marketing company. For the purposes of this review, we are looking solely on its activities in the web hosting market.

The company appears to focus solely on shared hosting services, and its packages include unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited email addresses. All customers receive 30GB of disk space, and all customer website data is hosted in the cloud. The operating system isn't clear, although we'd guess that all packages are provisioned on Linux servers.

Shared hosting packages also come with a free site builder tool, a one-click installer tool that provides instant set-up for well-known scripts and applications, and a "simple" control panel for managing hosting and billing. The brand of control panel is not specified, but we would guess that it is not cPanel, since the brand is not mentioned anywhere on the site.

Clear Sense also provides domain registration services, and domains can be purchased with or without hosting. It offers .se registrations for Swedish customers, plus around 650 other TLDs, including internationally available domains such as .com. It also offers website design services as an extra add-on to its core hosting offering.

Infrastructure

Clear Sense doesn't explicitly mention its data center on its website, so it's not possible to determine where its customers' files are hosted.

Support and Customer Service

On the Clear Sense website, you'll find a knowledgebase section, in Swedish only. This section provides answers to some basic set-up and billing questions, and will be most useful to new or novice users.

Technical support is provided via email and telephone. Lines are open from 10am to 3pm local time, on weekdays, with one hour deducted each day for lunch. The company does not appear to offer out-of-hours support.

Judging by the material on the Clear Sense website, we would take a guess that support is provided in Swedish only. However, there isn't any clear mention of exactly which languages are supported.

Backups

Clear Sense says that it takes nightly backups of all data on its web hosting servers, and it says that customers can restore deleted files if they need to. This doesn't appear to be a self-service backup process, and it's not clear whether there's a fee for the restore.

Uptime Guarantee

Clear Sense offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee on all of its shared hosting plans.

Billing and Payment

For hosting, Clear Sense takes payments through its customer account section, which is behind a login screen on its website. At the time of writing this review, the account section was not functional. However, Clear Sense displays logos for Visa, MasterCard and Discover on its website, so we can assume that it takes credit card payments.

Summary

Clear Sense is part of a much larger company, and its hosting services need to be considered as part of the wider marketing services it provides. While the site is lacking in some technical detail, and we had to make some assumptions about features and terms, it will be an attractive option for small businesses in Sweden who want hosting, web design and SEO as a package.